Re: languages of pre-I.E. Europe and onwards

Hallo!

On Sun, 25 Jan 2009 16:54:32 +0000, David McCann wrote:

> Seriously, Ray (and others), you have to take things in a wider,
> non-linguistic context. If you read a book on the history of alphabets,
> Brahmi may be compared to both the Phoenician version of North Semitic
> and to South Semitic. The point forgotten there is that the Indians
> traded with Arabia but not with Phoenicia. How then were they supposed
> to have learnt the Phoenician script?
Via the Silk Road?  But frankly, I don't know.

> With languages, there is similarly a limit to how far people wandered
> before modern times,
There is ample evidence that even before modern times, some
people moved around a lot, and languages spread even faster,
as people take over prestigious languages from their neighbour.
There is no problem with a language family traversing an entire
continent within a few thousand years.

>       and ancient population movements can be
> reconstructed by molecular biology.
Be careful.  The idea of grafting language family tree on genetic
trees, as done by Cavalli-Sforza and his followers, is generally
met with suspicion, as genetic relationship does not necessarily
imply linguistic relationship, and vice versa.

> Etruscan is spoken in Europe. All other European languages are either
> Nostratic or Dene-Caucasian (that should be good for a few more
> comments :-). The odds are that Etruscan is going to be one or the
> other. The one thing we certainly know is that it won't be Khoisan.
One moment.  "Nostratic" and "Dene-Caucasian" are far from
accepted.  "Nostratic" is based on a combination of two different
kinds of speculations about the external relations of Indo-European.
Some people assume that Indo-European was related to Semitic; others
assume that it was related to Uralic, Altaic and a few others; now,
what the Nostraticists say is "Why cannot it be related to both?"

Actually, there is no evidence for an IE-Semitic relationship.
The idea was based on the notion that "both families are inflecting".
But so are, for instance, various indigenous American languages, and
the inflectional systems of IE and Semitic are wholly different.
The Nostraticists then present word lists, but most of the words on
those lists tend to be agricultural and stockbreeding terms, and if
one considers that any relationship between IE and Afro-Asiatic must
date back to way before the beginning of agriculture (because Afro-
Asiatic alone, which Semitic is member of, must be at least 10,000
years old - and probably originated from Ethiopia, quite far away
from the other "Nostratic" languages), these lexical similarities
must have been words borrowed from language to language with the
spread of agriculture.  Also, the sound correspondences are not
regular, which also indicates borrowing.

The other wing of "Nostratic", the IE-Uralic-Altaic relationship,
looks a tad better; there are a few tantalizing lexical and even
morphological correspondences between these languages (and Kartvelian
seems to fit in as a peripheral member as well), but the matter is
not closed yet.  Dravidian, however, has nothing to do with that,
if you ask me.

Now, "Dene-Caucasian".  This is simply a trashcan into which all the
"non-Nostratic" languages of northern Eurasia (plus the Na-Dene family
of North America) are swept, with no supporting evidence.

> Also remember cumulative probability. If the odds against a language
> having m- for "I" are 25:1, and the odds against -k for "and" are 25:1,
> the odds against both are getting a bit steep.
Sure.  The chance that a language has m- for 'I' is indedd quite
high (probably better than your 1/25 because /m/ is a very
frequent phoneme); but the more correspondences you have, the
slimmer the chances for an accidental resemblence get.  If you
have entire paradigms that match, you can indeed assume that
the languages are related.  IE and Etruscan indeed looks quite good,
especially in light of the fact that so little is known about
Etruscan.

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